The telecommunications industry serves millions of customers with an important service that customers have come to depend on as an integral part of their lives. Telecommunications services are made possible by a vast network of products distributed across a large geographic area. It is imperative that changes to these products are accurately reported and tracked to completion according to the needs and requirements of the customer and the government. To stay current with advances in technology, maintain quality of service with minimal interruptions, and meet Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations regarding repair of defects in a timely manner, companies within the telecommunications industry must work with their suppliers to review and make implementation decisions on a voluminous quantity of product change notices in an organized and efficient manner. A product change notice (PCN) is a notification of change to a product that may be cosmetic, correct product flaws, or introduce new features. PCNs include any changes that affect form, fit, function, or the technical specification of the product.
As a result of the need to administer the implementation of PCNs in a timely manner, many industry members have mainframe-based systems to initiate and track PCNs. For example, in previous systems, suppliers generate a hardcopy PCN and provide the PCN to each company using their equipment. Company personnel then manually enter the PCN data into the mainframe. However, these systems provide only limited organizational functions to the users that are responsible for monitoring and implementing PCNs. For example, these previous systems require manual data entry of the PCN indexing data and show only that a PCN exists. However, the actual PCNs are not entered into previous systems and are entirely paper-based. Consequently, previous logging systems like these suffer from a number of drawbacks that render them inefficient.
One drawback is the large amount of time and large number of people required to evaluate, approve, and release a PCN for implementation using previous systems. Company evaluators review PCNs before approval, including evaluating the PCN details along with its indexing information. Indexing information is PCN header data that includes the PCN number, a brief description, and other key points of information to help locate the actual PCN. Although the company evaluators have initial notice that they need to evaluate a PCN, the actual hardcopy PCN is not delivered to evaluators until later by mail. Because the actual PCN details cannot be evaluated until the paper copy arrives by mail, there can be a significant delay between notification and approval of the PCN. Such delays can cause delays in repairing equipment, thereby causing monetary penalties for companies due to FCC regulations and strained relations with local Public Service Commissions and customers. Secondly, because of the large volume of PCNs generated by suppliers, previous systems necessitated extensive labor-intensive activity requiring a large numbers of employees to manually input indexing data and process and file the paper copies.
Furthermore, with previous systems, technicians that are troubleshooting problems within a telecommunications network cannot readily obtain historical data on changes made to the network on which they are troubleshooting. For example, using previous systems, a technician cannot easily obtain information regarding whether a PCN has already been applied to a network element. This type of information is essential in reducing the amount of time required to solve equipment problems.
Another drawback of previous systems stems from the fact that notice of the PCNs is not proactively shared with entities affected by the change. For example, obsolete products may be erroneously cycled through the repair process simply because inventory personnel are not informed of PCNs. Further, efficiency is compromised when technicians make needless repair dispatches due to the inability of obtaining timely and proactive notification of a PCN. Suppliers are also not notified when PCNs they send are received and they are left wondering if their notices have been accepted and approved. As a result, more delay is introduced because suppliers cannot begin implementing the change until they receive notice of approval from the company.
Therefore, in light of the above, there is a need for a method, apparatus, and computer-readable medium for administering the implementation of PCNs from telecommunications suppliers and manufacturers of network products that provide more complete facilities for receiving, processing, monitoring, updating, and implementing PCNs. There is a further need for a method, apparatus, and computer-readable medium that improve the efficiency of PCN implementation, and provide timely notification to entities affected by the change.